Pregnancy as the Start of Integration

This has been as much a political journey as it has been a personal and intimate one. So, this history will be told in the first person.
Hi, I’m Dyana Gravina, founder of Procreate Project’s platforms and the Mother House Studios model and creator of this *toolkit.

The roots of this work trace back to 2013, when I arrived in the UK three months pregnant, a newly landed migrant from Italy. I was navigating a major life shift in a context where I had no extended network, family, or blueprint to follow.

In that moment pregnancy: a body within a body, became an experience of deep, embodied *integration. I have encountered the dynamic tension between what we are told about an experience and what it truly is in practice. That tension became fertile ground for transformation. The UK, at that time, offered both a blank canvas where the necessity for connection, healing and reinvention was possible. What began as a search for connection and visibility grew into something much larger: a platform for solidarity, a cultural intervention, and a call to reimagine systems. Procreate Project emerged from this space, not as a single initiative, but as a constellation of responses to systemic gaps, personal needs, and collective desires. It started with small gestures: conversations, zines, gatherings, visibility for the experiences of reproduction, pregnancy and mothering. It was kindled by the realisation of the lack of infrastructures of care around artists at this crucial time in their lives and who were often excluded from residencies, exhibitions, and professional opportunities instead. Over the past 12 years, Procreate Project has held space for that shared exploration, building infrastructures where care and creativity are not in conflict, but part of the same rhythm.

From the earliest stages, the experience revealed the impossibility of separation between care and creation. In the language of systems, pregnancy and care becomes a living metaphor for interdependence: transformation is happening on all levels, physical, emotional, professional, and political. For many artist-carers, pregnancy initiates a systemic shift. Time, space, identity, and priorities are reconfigured. This embodied transformation is not only personal but prefigures the potential for broader structural change. Integration is no longer optional, it becomes necessary to reimagine how we exist, relate and make art. This understanding became the foundation for Procreate Project’s work in building platforms where those intertwined realities could be seen, heard, valued, and made possible within the cultural sector.

Political and cultural backdrop

When Procreate Project launched in 2013, the UK was in the midst of a deep austerity regime introduced by the Conservative Liberal Democrat coalition government. Public funding cuts had drastically reduced support for early-years services, children’s centres, and community-led care infrastructure, particularly impacting working-class, migrant, and single-parent families. Universal Credit and welfare reforms further entrenched precarity, disproportionately affecting women, especially those with caregiving responsibilities.

At the same time, feminist discourse was gaining visibility in the cultural sector. Institutions were beginning to platform ‘feminist art’, but often through a depoliticised lens, detached from the material realities of care work, economic inequality, and systemic exclusion. Within this contradiction, where care was thematised but rarely structurally supported, Procreate Project emerged as both an intervention and a proposition.

We positioned parenting not as a barrier to art-making, but as a valid methodology: a way of knowing, making, and organising. We began to document, platform, and financially support artistic practices rooted in lived maternal and caregiving experience, building both a creative archive and a political statement. Procreate Project was born from urgency, but also from a belief in new possibilities: where care could be understood not only as a subject but as a foundation for cultural production.

Trajectory and Transformation

What began from necessity, a response to the structural invisibility of caregiving in the arts, became a constellation of platforms rooted in both resistance and vision. Procreate Project’s evolution has never been linear: from nomadic and online exhibition formats to pop up residencies, from temporary studios to permanent models like Mother House Studios, each phase asked us to listen, adapt, and remain in relationship with the communities we serve.

The first five years have been self-funded, as predicted by some advisors in the earlier days, we could only access funding once we had built a track record of activities and proved the need for such a platform to exist in the first place. Which already sets a risk for many grassroots and artist-led initiatives to be dismantled at the idea stage.

Therefore, the first projects were made possible through the in-kind support of people and organisations like Maria Rosa Margiotta who financed the first PCP website where the first works and artists interviews could be shared; Althea Greenam, at the Goldsmith Women’s Art Library, Sylvie Gormezano, Edu Solaz at IKLECTIK, Pauline de Souza, Hermione Wilthshare at the Royal College of Art, 198 Contemporary Art and Learning, Helen Knowles at Birth Rites Collections, Amy Dignam co-organiser of the first Mother House Studio pilot project (2016), Martha Joy Rose at the Museum of Motherhood and more. It was thanks to all the speakers, contributors and artists who have performed, have been in conversation with me and gave their time with no financial retribution, that the platforms became deep with meanings and potential. It was pushed forward by a shared need for these projects to exist, felt both by the ones participating in person as well as the larger international community that found validation, visibility, and inspiration in the work. Many went on to replicate or adapt similar models, placing care not only at the centre of the subject matter but at the heart of how things were made.

“ I have known Dyana for almost a decade as a practising artist. Being invited to present my work on the Procreate Project website gave me crucial encouragement, visibility, and validation, and PCP has consistently been a torchbearer for artists navigating the complex challenges of balancing caregiving with creative practice. Its work has had a profound impact on my journey, and It directly inspired me to initiate my own project: A.M.M.A.A. – The Archive for Mapping Mother Artists in Asia.”

Dr Ruchika Wason Sigh

Relationships and thoughts on Institutionalisation

In 2018 I was joined by Paola Lucente, an accidental meet up of two southern Italians with two different professional and class backgrounds that found each other in the attempt to keep this work going and available to more people. With her previous institutional background, Procreate Project expanded its opportunities to connect with established networks in the art sector. Becoming more recognised within institutional and funding contexts brought new visibility but also new tensions. We had to navigate what it meant to maintain an ethos of care and integration while working within systems that are designed to welcome the experience of parents, or any artist that doesn’t fit a certain description.

Challenging conversations shaped the texture of our production work and often provoked change beyond our own context, creating ripple effects that benefited the wider community of artists. Rather than conforming to traditional models, we stretched them—embedding flexibility, softness, and access into the design of open calls, residencies, and programmes. This meant redefining timelines, rethinking success, and inviting collaborators to co-create frameworks that made space for non-linearity and care work. Over time, however, continually pushing for these deeper layers of change, while delivering events and programmes under pressure, also led to personal exhaustion.

In 2019, project-based funding contributed to the scaling of the Mother Art Prize and the Oxytocin platform, originally run with no financial support, as well as to the first longer-term Mother House Studios in 2020. The Mother House Studios, first piloted in 2016 and 2017 in London and Stroud, had struggled to find the right resources to become a permanent solution to the logistical and emotional barriers that confines artists in the domestic space. Funding received in 2020 allowed us to open the first venue in Lewisham.

From building companies, developers, and landlords to local authorities, our work was constantly challenged by the difficulty of holding all the threads of operations while creating conditions for artists and their children to share space, re-imagine their practices and lives, and make art. Despite these challenges, the community grew and today has become the first satellite project, collectively self-organised in Lewisham centre by a group of resident artists.

This collective strength continues to prompt reflection on how resources are distributed and how the unpaid labour of artists and art workers is still justified under the pretence that care-related work, mothering, and artmaking do not have financial value, even though this unpaid labour sits at the foundation of capitalistic systems.

We have not been able to raise funding to grow the structural resilience and scale of our grassroots organisation into a sustainable model. This remains the reason why today PCP, and myself, are taking a long pause to reconsider how I can contribute to this work. My desire is to have this new platform as a tool where the infiltration and realisation of models of *Integrated Care doesn’t belong to one but it’s feasible to implement to create new modalities of work and relationships. Where the collective efforts are made easier, knowledge is shared and not owned, and a sense of possibilities remains alive for today and tomorrow’s arts and cultural environments.